Almost excatly 20 Years ago the first version of perl was released. To celebrate this birthday, a new version of perl 5.10.0(including some fixes and extensions) was released this week.
some of the new features:
- a mew smart match operator, to make comparisons "do the right thing" automatically
- regular expression engine has been tweaked, tuned and sped up in many cases
- finally there is a switch statement (one of the most wanted things)
- state variables (which persist between calls to subroutines)
- a defined-or operator
- field hashes for inside-out objects and better error messages
- Interpreter was improved to be faster with a smaller memory footprint
- and: the Perl installation is now relocatable

More info at the Perl 5.10.0 Release announcement or at at perl.org